Thursday, March 31, 2005

Letting Go!

Lucky me, I keep getting to practice letting go, and letting go, and letting go, even to the point that I went yesterday to a major medical exam alone to have several cat scans knowing I would have to have dye, knowing that my sensitive body has reacted badly to dye in the past, and knowing I would not have anyone with me to quell my anxiety. In the end, it wasn’t all that big of a deal. Peter had gone to visit his daughter and grandson in New Jersey. He had not seen them in weeks and really wanted to take the opportunity to visit.

Today, again, more letting go. We are in the car, Peter and I, heading for a four day stay on Block Island where I will be co-leading a writing workshop for poets for the weekend and as we pass over the Stevenson Dam on Route 34 East, making our way to New Haven to pick up Route 95 towards Rhode Island, they, the mysterious they, are letting water go, tons of it rushing through the dam spillway and into the Housatonic. Letting go keeps showing up every where I look. An old friend came to stay with us last night while he is spending two weeks in New England and the Northeastern states on a mini poetry tour. Peter and I both forgot we had offered him a bed, forgot, even, that he was going to be in the neighborhood. We are doing a lot of forgetting of late, our minds so packed with last minute details and there are so very many last minute details, and it isn’t even the last minute yet. So our friend, Jack McCarthy, is reading at a local poetry venue, mine, dah, and staying with us and we have yet to pack and we need to leave the house by 7:30 a.m. to catch the 11 a.m. ferry out of Point Judith. I am stressed from the moment I am suddenly reminded, at 7:15 p.m. last night as I pull up to the poetry venue and see Jack’s beautiful profile through the window, that Jack is here, and I love him dearly, so does Peter, and we want to have a wonderful catching up type of visit, and we haven’t packed, and Robin is meeting us at the diner at 7:40 a.m. so she can follow us to the ferry for two and a half hours. And I just have to keep letting go.

I came home last Sunday, after ten days away, to a house in disarray and more obligations for three days I would be at home than are practical for even your above-average superhero. To complicate matters, I see one doctor Monday morning after having some problems while I was vacationing on the Cape last week, he sends me to another doctor who sees me that afternoon and takes up three hours of my day. The second doctor schedules me for multiple cat scans for Tuesday which will take up another three hours of another day and Tuesday is the day we have chosen to clean out the garage, one of the cleaning efforts I am insisting on before we leave for Key West in less than a month, though I finally did agree to let the attic go until we get back in early August. It has been that way for years. What’s a few more months? I suppose.

I like the idea of letting go of all the useless, antiquated, and/or broken junk we have accumulated. Most of what is in the attic is mine. Most of what is in the garage is Peter’s and includes stuff from his parents who died years ago and we just piled their stuff in the garage with all the other stuff in the garage. Towards the end of the day Tuesday, there is nearly as much stuff in the driveway for the dump as there is in the garage. The garage has never looked this good in all the 14 years we have lived here. It was made possible, and, no, this is not a commercial, by engaging a professional organizer for four hours on Tuesday. Of course we should have done it ourselves, we should have done it years ago and done it ourselves, and we should have kept it up all this time. And we should not have spend the money Tuesday on cleaning the garage that we need for other things. What happened in that four hours was amazing, however. Peter was upset about my hiring a professional organizer, she did not come cheap, neither of us are working, money is an issue, we took funds out of one of Peter’s retirement accounts, cleaned the account out actually, and have already gone through a third of it handling things that need to be handled so we can be on the road for three months, including some things I insist need to be handled, though the need for them is quite debatable. But this morning, early in our drive, Peter agreed it was a good investment, the professional organizer that is. Whew.

Today, we are 3 weeks and 4 days from leaving for the biggest trip either of us have embarked on in our combined 116.5 years. There goes that counting thing again. And I have to keep letting go, letting go of Jack who we have not seen in months and months and we adore him and we miss not being able to spend time with him today, though we happily gave over the house to him to enjoy for the day before he heads over to New York for other feature programs in the next few days; letting go of all that is still chaos in the house and we are going to be away, again, so there is no dealing with anything in the house until we get back and are going to be down to three weeks, just three weeks; letting go of magazines, or at least starting to, Peter took about 320 magazines to the recycle center Tuesday. Do you have the sense that I am hyperventilating while all this is happening? Monday night, my daughter and my good friend Dasha helped me to go through magazines. The two of them were relentless. I was browsing each one looking for photos of interest for my writing workshops, and looking for articles of interest that I know will make me a better person or a better writer, or a better environmentalist, or a better social activist, or a better political activist, or more savvy about new technology, or simply better read, if I would just read them. I would then tear those items out. But when Dasha found the first of many magazines dated 1996, and it is now 2005, well, she laid down the law, the first one of the evening anyway. The first law was that anything older than 1998 goes out immediately. This mutated over the course of a few hours to anything older than 2000. But what about my old issues of Poets and Writers? What about National Geographic, Writer’s Digest, Teaching Tolerance, The Sun? What about Living (the Martha Stewart magazine for better quality living)? What about …? So I finally left the room and left Chris to go through the remaining magazines and make the decisions without me there. Let go, I have to keep telling myself.

Tuesday, while working in the garage, with our professional organizer knee deep in our 14 years of accumulated shit, I kept having to face those questions she was so good at asking, and always so calmly, so compassionately, so matter of fact. Do you use it? Will you use it? Does it have sentimental value? And things went on shelves in appropriate places, or they went in one corner for giving away or putting on eBay, or they went in the pile for the dump. A lot went into that pile, broken furniture that we never fixed, we just relegated to the wasteland of our garage. Paint cans so old you could not open them, boxes of paper that were is various stages of decomposition, and on, and on, and on. Let go, I kept telling myself. Susan said we did a great job when she finished her four hour stay with us. We were not done when she had to leave, but we were close, damn close. So, we left the house this morning and I am unprepared to teach this weekend, me Ms. Anal, and I will have to make it work as I go, not that I haven’t done this 100 times, but I like to have everything under control. It would be hard to assess that about me from the state of my house. But I love exactness, I love orderliness, simplicity, and for three months, everything I need will be on me, or my bike, in my day pack or Peter’s day pack, or on his bike, or we will get it when we need it along the way. And we will leave behind our families, our friends, we will leave behind the house and what ever contents still remain three weeks and four days from now. I feel like a hot air balloon, too full, pulling at the cords that tether me to this earth, pulling and afraid to let go, wanting to be free and hesitating at moments to fully accept this life changing experience for what it is, and I have to keep telling myself it will be okay, and I know it will, but I was never good at letting go, though I have often told myself I am, and often enough I have moved through something difficult and out the other side with aplomb, but this letting go this time is not going to happen with aplomb.

I have been teary eyed on an off for a week, maybe more. I keep putting it off to stress, and part of it is undoubtedly stress, but it is more. It is much more and it is simple. It is simply letting go. Letting go of my daughter watching the house for three months, letting go of my plants, they will or they won’t survive without me, letting go of my cats, I am sure they will survive without me, letting go of my crushes on this poet or that, letting go of other people’s expectations of me before I leave and during the ride. Peter argues that I am not, however, letting go of my expectations of others. I disagree. My daughter is a prime example, but Peter has expectations around Chris that far exceed mine and make it difficult for him to see my acceptance, he is too busy focusing on his lack of acceptance. He will promptly shoot back that my second hand psychology is bullshit if he had a chance to add his opinion to these pages. Of course he would say that my opinion in this matter is second hand psychology and that my second hand psychology is bullshit, it always is when it means he has to look at something about himself that he doesn’t want to acknowledge (I say this with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek, it’s not as if I don’t have my own blind spots). He proceeds to whine that I have the advantage of getting in the last word here, it is my post. He is right. But, I digress.

I have also been letting go of the money issues with doing this trip. Karen, the director of the East Coast Greenway, during a meeting with her and Bill, and Lisa in New Haven this past Monday during which Peter and I were finalizing our partnership with Greenway regarding our volunteer efforts in their name during this trip and their moral and physical support of our trip, which is more than we expected, mused how we robbed one of our retirement accounts to make this trip possible, and we do still hold out hope for some funding here and there to make it less painful in the end, but back to Karen who saw the humor in our depleting our retirement funds to do something that will add years to our lives. We will very likely live longer as a result of this trip if we survive it, and we will have one-third the retirement monies we had a month ago.

I let go of the house early on, which makes it a bit easier to live with the financial choices we are making to do this trip. Of all the things I am struggling to let go of, the house came easy. If we have to sell it, we have to sell it. How can a house matter more than a trip like this. I came from a background of poor white trash, not Angela’s Ashes poverty, and reading that book made me feel a whole lot better about my own childhood, but poor white trash nonetheless, and poor southern white trash. Having a house is wonderful, and I can live without it. At least that is what I am telling myself.

So there I was, Monday, at the second doctor’s appointment of the day, and doctor number two gives me a what-for about not delaying the trip if need be for medical reasons. I won’t bore you with the details, but I have let go of that, too. I am leaving as planned, April 25th, even if they tell me news that is devastating, not that devastating news is expected. If I die on the road, and yes, I am being a bit melodramatic, well, maybe more than a bit, but so be it, it will be like a cowboy dying with her boots on.

And I should have been prepping for the weekend on this drive, instead of making this entry in the book, but I let that go, too.

Yesterday, while Peter was visiting with his daughter and grandson Maxx, Peter and Melissa had Chinese for lunch and the fortune cookie’s fortune read You are soon to embark on an enjoyable journey.